FoxNews Derangement Syndrome has long since joined Palin Derangement Syndrome and Bush Derangement Syndrome as conditions afflicting the angry left.

Glenn Reynolds often asks is there anything bacon can’t do?  Maybe he should also ask is there anything FoxNews (or Sarah Palin or George W. Bush) can’t be blamed for.  On Thursday and today, he linked two posts either correcting or failing to correct Robert Reich’s post* faulting FoxNews for helping gin up that “huge anti-incumbent wave” in 1994, you know, against the then-Democratic congressional majority.

Problem is, as Frank Ross points out, “Prof. Reich overlooked one minor detail: FoxNews Channel’s first broadcast wasn’t until October 7, 1996.”

The Huffington Post which also ran the column, as Alpaca reports, has yet “to issue a correction/retraction to the story.“

Guess the editors there still can’t fathom how Republicans won back Congress without FoxNews.  I mean, you know, how else could the American people have been turned against health care reform which everyone supports because it’s the right thing because liberals back it and they always want the very best for everyone (Except Sarah Palin.  And George W. Bush.   And Dick Cheney)?

But, here’s the kicker:  Reich was Secretary of Labor during the entirety of Clinton’s first term.  He’s not some upstart leftie blogger who didn’t to to college until this century and didn’t know when Fox was founded.   Reich was in the public eye in 1994; he had to be aware that there was no FoxNews until the month Clinton was re-elected.  Is this then, some kind of ex post facto memory when you apply your current prejudices to the past?

* (more…)

So by now, you have probably heard that the young conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe was arrested this week on charges that he was attempting to wiretap (or something) the offices of US Sen. Mary Landrieu. O’Keefe came to public attention last year when he exposed the corruption in many ACORN offices around the USA in a hidden camera expose.

My first reaction to O’Keefe’s arrest was “oh how stupid of him.” Upon further reflection, I have changed my mind. I think O’Keefe is a patriot and was probably onto something that We, The People should know about involving Sen. Landrieu.

Since the media no longer investigates corruption among the liberal elite, the burden falls to brave souls like O’Keefe.

The American Left praises and honors such real criminals and murderers as Castro, Che, Mao and Mumia Abu Jamal. Surely I’m not going to throw O’Keefe under the bus until I know all of the facts. And if he was in the pursuit of truth, then I think his actions were justified.

James O’Keefe is no less a patriot than Ted Kennedy is a murderer. After all, the Democrats in Washington continually ignore our nations’ laws and the US Constitution. Perhaps it is time for We, The People to join the fight on their terms.

These are indeed times that try men’s souls and our time sometimes requires extraordinary measures to expose lies and stand up for Liberty.

UPDATE (from Dan): Bruce, this appears to be an area where we disagree, though appreciate this defense from a commenter at Althouse. Right now, I’m with Malkin, “Know your limits. Know the law. Don’t get carried away. And don’t become what you are targeting.” That said, I’ll wait until the facts are in before rendering a final judgment.

In one of the iconic comments of his political career (at 1:18 below), Richard Nixon, after losing the California gubernatorial election in 1962 told the press, “You don’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more.”

Seems the Democrats can’t get enough of kicking around another Republican, their all-purpose bogeyman, George W. Bush, on whom they blame all manner of ills, including the groundswell of support in Massachusetts for a Republican sounding quite different from W, promising to rein in government spending. Still, Democrats contend “the fault for Coakley’s now-floundering MA SEN bid lies with one person — George W. Bush.“

To be sure, the son of a man who held Daniel Webster’s seat in the United States Senate did fault his party–for not being harsh enough on W:

One thing the Democrats have done wrong? We haven’t kept the focus on this disaster on the Republicans who brought it upon us. We’ve tried too hard to do that right thing, and that’s to fix it, as opposed to spend more of our time and energy pointing the finger at who got us [here] in the first place.

Yeah, Americans really like it when you’re always pointing the finger at someone else.  Guess he didn’t realize that it was a member of his own party who wanted “to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.“

Democrats will always have W:

While David Frum frequently posts intelligent policy pieces advocating conservative reforms and regularly makes thoughtful comments lambasting big-government Democratic initiatives, all too often he buys into the liberal narrative, you know those Administration talking points, about the GOP.   One such talking point is that while President Obama reached a hand out to the GOP in an attempt to work with them, Republilcan legislators replied by turning their backs (or spitting in his face).

Yeah, to his credit, after taking office, the President did meet with House Republicans, but the Democrat also retorted, “I won,” when Republicans raised concerns about the cost of the “stimulus.”  Democratic intransigence notwithstanding, Frum buys into the Democratic narrative and blames Republicans for Democrats’ unwillingness to compromise.  He even blames the Administration’s decision to impose carbon controls by administrative fiat on the GOP’s efforts to block cap and trade.  (He fails to mention Democrats from coal-producing states who have raised concern about the regulatory scheme.)

What other conservatives liken to Mafia tactics, Frum ascribes to GOP rejectionism:

The furious rejectionist frenzy of the past 12 months is exacting a terrible price upon Republicans. We’re getting worse and less conservative results out of Washington than we could have negotiated, if we had negotiated.

If we had negotiated?  We? Huh?  Does anybody seriously believe the Democrats wanted to negotiate?  Let’s see, they crafted the “stimulus” package without seeking input from the GOP, then moved heaven and earth to get a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate.  Just last week, “no Republican lawmakers were on the list of attendees” at the President’s job summit.

Hardly evidence of an Administration eager to compromise. (more…)

I believe it was in an e-mail to Bruce sometime in the spring when I saw the first poll of popular sentiment about the newly former President George W.Bush (where that good man, but flawed chief executive saw an uptick in his favorables while the incumbent saw his in decline) that I suggested we have a contest to figure out when those numbers would converge.  Well, that day may been soon upon us.

Over at the Atlantic, Chris Good reports:  ”only half of Americans would rather have President Obama in the White House than his predecessor, while 44 percent would prefer George W. Bush to still be president.“

He cites a Public Policy Polling survey which found:

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama’s declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

If Obama keeps reminding us of the “tough situation he inherited” (as he did again Tuesday), Americans might not think him up to the job.  You know, when a new CEO is hired to take over a company with declining revenues, he doesn’t blame the old management, but rolls up his sleeves and figures out how to fix the mess.  If he keeps blaming the old management while revenues continue to decline, the board will likely replace him at their next meeting.

Looks like the “board” of this organization is beginning to think more favorably about the old CEO, even though he has gone into a constitutionally mandated (and not entirely unwelcome) retirement.  And the Constitution prevents the board from meeting for another three years.  Looks like we’re stuck with the whiny CEO.

And his hapless predecessor begins to look better by contrast.

Wonder if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will ever take responsibility for her own mistakes.  The “so-called stimulus” isn’t creating the jobs she and her fellow Democrats promised so she vows to spend even more of our money on similar government schemes.

It’s like hiring a guy to do magic incantations to cure your recurrent headaches, then when his supposedly healing words don’t work and the headaches return with even greater force, tossing the Tylenol and renewing his contract.

Now, with the Democrats having been in charge for ten full months (and then some), after having promised us that should Congress pass that aforementioned “stimulus,” unemployment would peak at 8%, Mrs. Pelosi, wait for it, blames her party’s all-purpose bad a guy, a Mr. George W. Bush:

Though jobs numbers released this morning were better than expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want anyone to forget that the economic crisis started under the Bush administration.

The Department of Labor estimated today that just 11,000 jobs were lost in November. . . . Pelosi took the opportunity to take a few shots at the last administration.

(H/t Gateway Pundit.)  Hey, Nancy, you know when that recession began, you’d been Speaker for nearly a full year.

Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress.  Wonder then how your party’s victories impacted the economy.  And what you and your fellow partisans were doing to forestall an economic decline.

Perhaps, as one of his first acts as President of the United States, instead of returning a bust of Winston Churchill to our friends in the United Kingdom, Barack Obama had studied the life and leadership of that great man, he could better lead this great nation.   That Englishman “inherited” far worse problems from his two immediate predecessors than the American did from his.

And wheareas instead of demonstrating “bottomless reservoirs of gracelessness” in faulting those predecessors for “the terrible mess he inherited” as Obama has done toward his immediate predecessor, Churchill, according to Paul Johnson, showed magnanimity toward those flawed leaders:

Churchill wasted an extraordinarily small amount of his time and emotional energy on the meanness of life:  recrimination, shifting the blame onto others, malice, revenge seeking, dirty tricks, spreading rumors, harboring grudges, waging vendettas.  Having fought hard, he washed his hands and went on to the next contest.  It is one reason for his success.  There is nothing more draining and exhausting than hatred.  And malice is bad for the judgment.  Churchill loved to forgive and make up.  His treatment of Baldwin and Chamberlain* after he became prime minister is an object lesson in sublime magnanimity.  Nothing gave him more pleasure than to replace enmity with friendship, not least with the Germans.

An object lesson Obama is in sore need of learning.  In his speech on Afghanistan, by one pundit’s count, he “adverted at least half a dozen times to the supposed blunders of his predecessor.”  And he’s not the only official in his Administration who eschews such Churchillian magnanimity in order to lambaste George W. Bush.  In an email to supporters touting Obama’s Afghanistan speech, Vice President Biden “said of the new policy towards Afghanistan: ‘It’s a clean break from the failed Afghanistan policy of the Bush administration, and a new, focused strategy that can succeed.’“

Why must they always define their policies by contrasting them to the “failed” ones of W instead defending them on their own merits?

Wonder how we could make a teaching moment for these two?

* (more…)

Wow…. it seems that all of the liberal lies are falling apart this week ….

A U.S. Census worker found dead in a secluded Clay County cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a homicide, authorities have concluded.

Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, might have tried to cover the manner of his death to preserve payments under life-insurance polices that he had taken out. The policies wouldn’t pay off if Sparkman committed suicide, state police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said.

“We believe it was an intentional act on his part to take his own life,” said Rudzinski, who helped lead the investigation.

Bill Sparkman, the census worker found hanged Sept. 12 in a remote patch of Daniel Boone National Forest in Clay County. An autopsy report is pending. Photo courtesy of Corbin Times-Tribune. AP – FILE – In this undated 2008 photo, Bill Sparkman speaks to a 7th grade class during a lesson about sound waves. Authorities have released Sparkman’s body to his family nearly a month after he was found dead with a rope around his neck in rural eastern Kentucky. (AP Photo/The Times-Tribune, File)

Sparkman’s nude body was found Sept. 12 by people visiting the cemetery. There was a rope around his neck tied to a tree, and he had what appeared to be the word “fed” written on his chest in black marker.

You might remember the psychotic Andrew Sullivan’s screech when the death was first reported:

But the most worrying possibility – that this is Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts – remains real. We’ll see.

Will Andrew admit he was wrong and maligned 40% of the USA who self-identifies as conservatives?

Don’t count on it any more than Algore admitting his culpability in the largest world wide hoax and conspiracy ever committed.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

In his description of how the Democrats decided on the “stimulus,” Rand Simberg helps illustrate a problem I’ve discussed in previous posts.  Borrowing from the President’s metaphor of picking up a mop to clean up the mess (which he repeatedly reminds us) he “inherited,” that astute blogger and recovering aerospace engineer offers:

But Barack and Nancy (and Harry) don’t seem to know much about floor cleaning. They seem better at exacerbating messes than cleaning them up. When the president took power in January, his very first act was not to grab an effective cleaning solution. Instead, he pulled an old one off the shelves that the Democrats had been wanting to use for years, even though it has always proven ineffective against the type of mess that we were in (the mess having been caused by it in the first place). In too much of a rush to read the label on the bottle (generously assuming that the label was accurate), they dumped the whole thing into the bucket without diluting it. Then, in their rush to use it, they tripped over the bucket and spilled it all over.

(H/t Instapundit)

Confirming a point we make all too frequently on this blog, echoed by one of our readers who commented, “the libs have no answer to logic, and many can only resort to name-calling, from relatively tame to vile,” Congressman Maxine Waters call some Senators “Neanderthals.”  Quite a contrast from her Senator and mine, Ma’am Barbara Boxer who thinks we’re too well-dressed to be sincere.

But, then again, Robin Givhan thinks our casual attire causes us to lose respect while one Congressman has called those protesting the President’s policies “brown shirts.” At least, this guy, unlike his colleagues, apologized.  And Speaker Pelosi calls us astroturfers bearing swastikas while Harry Reid thinks we’re “evil-mongers.”  (No wonder he trails a number of potential opponents in the Silver State.)

Gosh, guess this people didn’t get the Democratic Chief Executive’s message about the new era of postpartisan politics.

Allahpundit gets at the essence of the Democrats’ angst:

Let me remind you again: They can pass any bill they want any time they want. Conservatives can scream their heads off at these things and there’s not an ounce of good it’ll do if Democrats are united. This whole partisan “war” Obama and Axelrod have concocted is kabuki theater against an enemy they’ve already (momentarily) defeated; it’s the Blue Dogs’ fear that they’ll be thrown out of office if they vote for this travesty that’s put the left in the predicament they’re in.

Emphasis added.

While the Democrats may rant and rave about those repugnant Republicans, the real issue is that they can’t hold their own party together.

And despite controlling all the levers of power, Democrats (and their allies on left-wing blogs), as Amity Shlaes noted back in May, seem angrier than ever.  Basically, the issue is more psychological than political, they need a target upon which to spew their venom.  And since they’ve long hated Republicans, why take down the target now that the GOP is out of power?

I mean, think about this for a second, they’ve elected a charismatic guy President who manages to get his mug on TV more often than most of his predecessors.  Much of the media leans left and gives their viewpoint favorable coverage.   With congressional majorities, they have more elected officials with more ready access to local media than do Republicans.  And they have Health Care for American Now (HCAN), an outfit with a $40 million budget to promote the Democrats’ proposed health care overhaul.

And yet, despite all these resources as their disposal, Americans disapprove of the President’s performance on health care. It’s not just one poll.  Via Glenn, we learn, “Polls from National Public Radio, Wall Street Journal/NBC News, The Washington Post, Gallup, and Pew all show that the American people do not support President Barack Obama’s health care plan.“

What went wrong? With a party led by a man adept at organizing, they can’t control public opinion, so they demonize adversaries and labeling concerned citizens as tools of corporate interests: (more…)

Reprinted in full:

Hi Ms. Douglas & Secretary Napolitano (since you are reading these, too):

I figured I would save you the trouble and send you an email right now so you can put me on your “Healthcare Enemies List” right away.  No fuss, no muss, no fishy-ness.

You see, I have read the legislation… I do know what HR 3200 says… I’m not being paid to protest, as a matter of fact my industry is supporting healthcare reform!   But I will continue to stand up against the Gestapo-like tactics of President Obama against those to oppose him for legitimate policy issues.

How dare you ask for my neighbors or my readers to inform on me.  This is an outrage better suited in the former Soviet Union, Syria or Iran.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

-Bruce Carroll (aka – GayPatriot)
Charlotte, North Carolina
www.gaypatriot.org

He wants to keep the issue alive as a distraction from his agenda.

The better to smear Republicans.

After reading a print-out of Claudia Rosett’s recent Forbes essay, “The Bear Scare,” I scribbled a note in the margin:

Sense of Obama’s reading of history as excluding American accomplishments . . . whole notion of reset button based on simplistic assumption that Bush’s entire policy was bad, [so he seeks] to define himself not so much as advancing American interests but [instead] as opposing his predecessor’s policies.

He has adopted that same rationale, at least rhetorically, on the economy as well, even though his domestic policy amounts to little more than an expansion of Bush’s, increased government spending.

And yet, even as Obama’s economic policy resembles that of his predecessor (albeit on steroids), he and his party’s minions are painting a picture of the “past eight years” (their favorite mantra) as a dark age akin to the Great Depression.  Note how Democratic spokespeople, in asking us to be patient about a recovery (which given the president’s promises in pushing the “stimulus” should already be underway) are telling us it took “eight years to get into this mess.”

It seems they’re banking on our short memories and the biased media coverage of the economy during the Bush years before the downturn.   That downturn only began in December 2007, nearly a full year after a Democratic Congress (which increased federal spending at a faster clip than did the prior spendthrift Republican Congress) came to power.

In short, given that the President and his team are better on offense than they are on defense, they seem intent on running against the “last eight years” just as Democrats spent nearly two generations running against Herbert Hoover.  Problem is that Hoover’s downturn began only a few months after he took office and while he served with a Republican Congress and that he responded with policies similar to those Obama (and the Democrats) are proposing today.  Those interventionist policies only prolonged the downturn.

The MSM, even biased against Bush, may let the Democrats get away with it, but if a poll which oversamples Democrats shows the President’ts numbers tumbling, it’s a sign Americans are judging the Administraiton by its record not the alleged excesses of the “last eight years.”

It seems that hatred of George W. Bush has become such an article of faith among Democrats that they can’t let a day go by without criticizing the former President for all manner of ills, from wrecking the economy to violating the law in order to keep the American people safe (to name just two of their biggest critiques).

Sunday morning, while fixing my coffee and determined to continue a weekend largely away from politics, I made the silly mistake of turning on the news.  Some former DNC official was telling us that it took “eight years to get into this [economic] mess” and it’s going to take some time to get out of it.  For a moment, I wished I had been the Republican designated to challenge her.  I would have replied by asking her to specify just what policies in the past eight years (i.e., the Bush Administration) led to this downturn and to remind her that the downturn began in December 2007, nearly one full year after a Democratic Congress came to power.

If the unmentioned Republican President deserves blame for the downturn so too does that Democratic Congress.

And as this Democratic President’s poll numbers tumble, his Administration and congressional Democrats are considering investigating that Republican Administration’s policies and officials.

There is some method to the Administration’s madness.  Obama and his political team have always been better on offense than defense.

The longer he serves as President, however, the less people will accept his excuse that he “inherited” this problem from his predecessor.  He’s smart to try to push a lot of legislation — as well as the Sotomayor confirmation hearings — during the summer when people are less focused on the news than they are during the rest of the year.

But, as the summer wanes and people focus more on the news after Labor Day, they’ll see the same man who had been in office when, sometime prior to Memorial Day, they pretty much  tuned politics out to focus on family, relaxation and recreation. Obama will no longer be the new guy brought in to clean up the old guy’s mess. People won’t cut him as much slack as they might have in his first two seasons in office.

* (more…)

Well, House Democrats aren’t very interested in backing up the woman they elected as Speaker of the House. Nancy Pelosi claimed the CIA lied to Congress.  In response, Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, sponsored a resolution to create a bipartisan congressional panel to investigate her claims.  The House, voting largely on partisan lines, rejected that probe.

Given how much attention this story has gotten, with even liberal friends of mine saying that her explanations don’t pass the “bulls***” test, you’d think House Democrats would welcome a probe as it would exonerate their Speaker.  (That is, if they believe she’s telling the truth.)  Democrats may not want to remember this, but former President Bush did not block proposals to investigate their claims that he lied us into the Iraq War.  And the Silbermann-Robb invesigation along with the Senate Intelligence Committee probe dismissed those claims (as did Lord Butler’s Report in Britain).

My guess those is Democats don’t want to similarly investigate Mrs. Pelosi because they don’t believe her and don’t want to revisit the embarrassment of her performance last week when, a few months hence, the panel reaches its conclusion that Mrs. Pelosi slandered the CIA.

So, instead of addressing the issue of her boss’s deception, her spokesman Nadeam Elsham does what Democratic staffers do best: blame Republicans.  She claimed that the GOP was engaged in “partisan politics and an attempt . . . to distract from the real issue of creating jobs and making progress on health care, energy and education.” Well, Miss Pot, that kettle sure does look black.  What do you think Mrs. Pelosi was doing in bringing up this issue in the first place?  And what has you been doing when her credbility has been called into question?  And what are you doing now?  Blaming Republicans.   And that’s partisan politics, pure and simple.

It seems House Democrats are trying to distract from the issue of dishonesty among their leaders and growing corruption within their ranks.  And this under the helm of the Speaker who promised us “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.“

UPDATE:  Factcheck offers a “detailed time line of Pelosi’s shifting accounts“  (Via Instapundit).

As I was driving to the Reagan Library yesterday afternoon, listening to Hugh Hewitt while caught in traffic on the 170, I heard Hugh (or was it one of his guests?) refer to former Vice President Cheney as the left’s “favorite punching bag.”  Before leaving home, I had read snippets of that good man’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and thought it one of his best, one which every American should read, particularly those critical of the previous Administration..

I began to reconsider my own past criticism of his post-Bush Administration outspokenness.  It seems he was only defending himself (and that Administration) against unwarranted criticism for his successors and the MSM.  While it may be unprecedented for an immediate past Vice President to criticize the incoming Administration, it is also unprecedented for a new President and his team to lay so much blame on his predecessor and his team.

So, when I heard expression, “punching bag,”on the radio, it reminded me yet again how members of the current Administration and their media and weblog cronies blamed their predecessors, particularly Cheney, for the current “mess.”  And I wondered (and not for the first time) how the former Vice President bore with such equanimity the vitriol hurled regularly against him for the better part of the past eight years.

(more…)

There is a a certain poetic justice in the travails of the Democratic Speaker of the House.  She joined her partisan colleagues in the zeal to prosecute Bush Administration officials for what the MSM has labeled “torture memos.”  And now it seems her grandstanding may cost her her job, possibly hurting her party’s standing with the general public.

No one seems to believe Nancy Pelosi.

Having promised “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history,” Mrs. Pelosi now becomes emblematic of an institutions in which the Democratic culture of corruption (to borrow an expression of which she was once so fond) rivals (and perhaps exceeds) that of the last Republican Congress.

You know a Democrat’s in trouble when the editorialist of the Washington Post question her credibility:  ”Ms. Pelosi’s shifting accounts and faltering performance at her news conference were far from reassuring.”  

As she begins to lose the trust of a number in the MSM who would normally be sympathetic to her, she does what most Democrats do when the spotlight is turned on them:  blame Bush.  ”Pelosi issued a statement late Friday shifting her criticism to the Bush administration – hours after CIA Director Leon Panetta defended his agency against Pelosi’s charges.“

Part of that criticism was to accuse Bush and his team of lying us into war in Iraq.  Never mind that those who leveled the charge could not point to a single statement that then-President made that he knew was wrong at the time he made it.  Now, we have an example of a claim Pelosi made with ample evidence indicating that she knew it was false at the time she made.

(In her defense, maybe she had forgotten what she learned during those CIA briefings in 2002-03.  But, instead of faulting her memory, she has accused the CIA of misleading Congress.)

It will be interesting to see if the same left-wing bloggers who repeated the mantra that Bush lied (without providing any actual evidence that he did) will similarly criticize the Democratic Speaker for her dishonesty (with substantial evidence that she lied).

(more…)

A friend forwarded an e-mail he received from Equality California (EQCA), the Golden State advocacy group which “works to achieve equality and secure legal protections for LGBT people.”  In that missive, the supposed gay rights’ group aligns itself with those who would increase the power of the state government in Sacramento, making it easier for legislators to raise taxes while supporting measures which all but ratify the state’s ever-expanding budget.

Once again, this gay group stands with the public employee unions and other special interest groups which oppose real reform of our bloated state budget:

Our friends in the LGBT Legislative Caucus asked EQCA to send out this important message about Tuesday’s election. Although EQCA PAC has not taken a position on these measures, below please find the unanimous recommendations of our LGBT legislators for your consideration. And remember to vote on Tuesday, May 19.

So, if they’re not taking a position on these measures, why did they feel compelled to send out this e-mail to their listserv?   

Perhaps because in the letter, the gay and lesbian legislators attack Republicans and “right-wing hardliners,” the demons whom gay groups must always malign (it’s an article of faith to them):

Because of an arcane rule that gives Republicans veto power over our state budget, we have already been forced to make drastic cuts to vital state programs such as health care, education and environmental protection.

If these measures do not pass, the right-wing hardliners are determined to “starve” state government by slashing schools, health care and hard-fought social and environmental protections will only be encouraged. 

Note that these criticisms have nothing to do with gay issues.  Note also how they repeat the left-wing lie about how the state legislature already made “drastic cuts” to “vital state programs.”  Drastic cuts?  Hardly?  With the highest tax rate in the nation, the Golden State has the biggest budget gap.  It’s failure to make such cuts which has caused that shortfall.

If they define those who want responsible state budgeting as “right-wing hardliners,” then come next Tuesday, they’re going to see that a majority of voters in this very blue state belong to this intransigent group of conservatives.

Once again, the gay groups ally themselves with the political left–on issues not related to our sexuality, a sign that they’re more interested in advancing left-wing ideology than in promoting the rights of gay and lesbian citizens.

Pelosi says Bush team misled her on waterboarding.  Trotting out the standard Democratic response.  When caught in a lie or facing a problem, blame Bush.  Nancy’s only making things worse for herself and better for Republicans.

Waiting in the wings, Steny Hoyer must be smiling.  He’s licking his chops at the prospect of an investigation. For the record, he’ll say it’s to clear her name (UPDATE:  well, it’s not clear what he’s saying for the record), but deep down, he knows it’s about taking her job.  She should have known better than to run her scandal-plagued man against him for Majority Leader.

*See this post.

UPDATE: Karl Rove: “The political persecution of Bush administration officials [Pelosi] has been pushing may now ensnare her.“

UP-UPDATE: Jim Geraghty doesn’t think Mrs. Pelosi will face any consequences for her dishonesty:

Are House Democrats going to lead the charge to remove her from the speakership? A push from the Obama team? Calls for her resignation from the mainstream press? I am skeptical. The Post editorial board will rough her up a little, the Times will write that the lack of evidence “raises troubling questions,” and Time and Newsweek will conclude that they don’t have enough space to get into it.

UP-UP-UPDATE John Hinderaker wonders if Pelosi can survive and cites the Washington Post’s Chris Civilizza who contends the Spaker “would not have held this sort of press conference unless she and her inner circle believed that she was losing altitude — politically — on the issue.“